


It stole along so stealthy

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, F/M, Ghosts, Halloween, Mirrors, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-08-28 18:18:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8456878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Even during the War, the year still turned and the worlds still touched.





	

Mary was standing so quietly before the looking glass Jed couldn’t help but wonder at what she saw within its mottled, silvery depths. It wasn’t like her, to be vain, though she was always neat and carefully dressed, the picture of propriety every dawn even if the night found her apron stained with blood or bile, her cuffs rolled back, her hem dusty. If he called her name, would he startle her? Or was she so still because she expected him? He walked closer, not trying to adjust the heaviness of his tread, the little sounds he’d ordinarily make, not intending to leap out and frighten her; it was Halloween and the darkness of night had seemed to fall earlier, more completely, invading Mansion House which had only some lanterns, the lit hearth of the parlor, the reflection of candlelight on the apples of Mary’s cheeks to combat the gloom.

“Mary, where are you?” Jed said, called really, the time and the shadows changing the timbre of his voice, pulling the words into the space between them like the undulation of smoke when a candle was blown. Where meant how and when, why, but where had been the first question he thought to ask and likely, the best.

“ _Mareike, wo bist du_?” 

She heard him, more clearly than she could remember in weeks, months of days, familiar from nights when she slept heavily, pressed into the thin mattress by a body of grief and suffering, hard, choking deaths of young boys, grown men who should have never left their homes, families without a father, a husband, a steady hand to the plow. She couldn’t say, even to herself, that she was startled to hear Gustav, not tonight, when the boundary between the worlds had broken wide, not merely cracked as it always was for her; there were ghosts around her tonight so thick she felt she was in a meadow full of flowers, the leaves and petals and stems all brushing against her skirts, stroking against her hands, her waist, her lips. It could hardly be a surprise to see his dear, bearded face in the glass, his dark eyes, not tonight when she had waited for him, for what else could she do?

“ _Hier bin ich, mein Liebling_ ,” she murmured and Jed wondered whom she was speaking to. Did she even know herself? 

His German was not as strong as his French, but he could understand her, and what was more, he recognized the tone she used from the nights she had nursed him, when there had only been her gentle hands and her voice in the hours that were too small to contain his suffering. He hadn’t been able to appreciate then how intimate her tone had been, how she had sung him lullabies in German and husky, hesitant Scottish airs she must have been learned from a grandmother who’d never spoken anything but Gaelic, nothing like the distinct, rousing, confident declarations she made to the men on the wards or quick wit she would display if the boy was well enough. Something had been kindled between the two of them from the moment she threw herself into the fray, onto him to prevent the patient with the gun from accomplishing a murder, and he hadn’t been able to observe, from within, what bound them. But tonight—a night he’d never felt should be any different but which suddenly, certainly was, tonight he was unsure, unbalanced, found himself _with_ her in a manner he could not account for. He remembered his sister and his cousins, Clara and Delia and sunny, pig-tailed Henrietta playing with apple peels like red satin ribbons and scattering cornmeal on the broad slab of sandstone step to look for phantasmal prints, the evidence of another plane, a future they couldn’t quite imagine, but this… alteration he and Mary were sharing was something he couldn’t name though he could feel it, like the blaze of sunlight through closed eyes, the compelling conviction of a dream that lingered into day, the shock when some half-remembered detail was before him, a chipped cup or the ridged, broken spine of a book, the flaking gilt rubbing off onto his fingers.

Jed looked at her in the glass and saw her face as he had not seen it before, her gaze abstracted and simultaneously immediate, alert and aware… but of what and how he struggled to know. He wanted to know as intensely as he wanted to walk right up behind her and put his hands on her waist, the heat of her skin evident through the buckram stays, the sturdy laces pulled taut, the fine wool of her bodice. He felt he could hardly resist pressing his lips against the nape of her neck and smelling the heady scent of rosewater and woman in her braided hair; he realized he was filled with a possessive tenderness only she had ever stirred in him, the desire for a child, their child in her belly, for giddy lust to be followed by fondness, to give a caress to please and not for his own pleasure, to make laughter breathless and breath gasp, his name, hers, any endearment broken by hunger and delight, only “sweet--” uttered, “heart” swallowed in a kiss more animal than he’d ever been allowed, her regard still intelligent even as she, they, became wild and then returned to selves that were more complex and complete.

“Mary?” he asked and in the mirror, they saw each other, or he at least saw her looking and he could not look away.

Mary hadn’t known there could be two faces within the glass or three, double-treble, but the surface wasn’t brittle and the light that lapped against the pane soaked through, everything soft and subtle, everything secret half-revealed. She heard Jed’s voice and the echo of Gustav, understood that what she heard was what it must sound like when a man loved her and wondered where she had gone, and their faces were both within the gleaming frame; Gustav’s eyes affectionate and sad—to leave her? Calm as he was when he measured reagents from their flasks, accepting that the chemicals would behave how they must, smoke or seethe. Jedediah was curious, always so curious! and intent, appealing and ardent and half-afraid she would answer when he asked a question. What was real? Tonight—and afterwards? What should govern her—memory or hope, if the memory made her ache and the hope tempted? Would either of the scientists before her believe any of this, where she found herself on this edge, the other world that lapped her daily prepared to drown her if she wouldn’t try to swim through its currents that had risen with the night, the gentle purring Plum made into the sky that had dropped from the heavens to prowl around them all? Mary was dizzy with choice and yet her feet, her spine, her heart felt the iron and copper of her blood weighting her and if the ghosts around her were quiet, it was only because they chose to be.

She still hadn’t answered but Jed knew that if he took a step closer, Mary would turn and without waiting, without warning, she would put her arms around him, a hand stroking his bearded cheek and moving to trace his skull beneath his tousled curls, dropping to his neck to draw him to her as she stretched, arched into him, her embrace as bold and assured as a man’s or perhaps it was only what any woman would do when she knew she was cherished and loved her lover in freely, with full measure. He might have known any night but surely, he did tonight, and what he couldn’t tell was what he could bear—to be let go, to have her hands fall away and the sweet warmth of her gone without any prospect of a return. He would step back but not away and he called her name softly, a different name that made the looking-glass shiver, ripple, rage and freeze, chaos disordered into order, a system new and remarkable.

“Molly?”

He’d known, even if he wouldn’t admit it, how to call her back to the room, the faded Turkey rug, the chilblain on her finger raw and smarting, away from the space she’d found between, within and without the worlds, where the face of a bearded man, much longed for, shifted without even the blink of her eye from one to another, both there because she’d wanted them to be; she was allowed neither, not properly, but she wanted both and couldn’t imagine when that would change but it was easier to admit it on a night like this, with the reflections in the glass at a wavering distance. She felt or she remembered Gustav’s hand cupping her cheek when she was dazed by her mathematics, the color of the forsythia blooming first in April, his dear voice reciting Schiller, and yet Jedediah’s presence behind her had not lessened. She thought the air around them was a veil, distance false, that they touched when she knew the feel of his hand at her wrist, pushing back a strand of hair, his head laid in her lap while he wept, and she knew how incontrovertible the reality was. She must return to it and the faces in the glass agreed, encouraging her with their eyes and not the hint of a smile.

“Yes, Jedediah?”

Would she sound this way if he woke her in the morning with a kiss to her bared shoulder? Or if he interrupted her when she was ink-stained and nearly buried in foolscap with figures and diagrams he couldn’t understand? Or only on a night like tonight, when the Irish boys blessed themselves twice and Plum had hissed at him when he tried to stroke her fur, when Matron had eyed him and said, “It’s a waste, ye would never listen to an old women, neither,” and sucked at her pipe when he’d asked her about Mary and had hardly paused for her answer. He had asked for her and called her name and then called her the name he used rarely, except for his dreams, when it was all he said, _Molly Molly Molly_ and there was always some answer, even if only a sidelong glance before she bent to bandage a faceless boy’s leg. Now she replied and had put some question in her voice but he wasn’t sure which.

“I was looking for you and…you didn’t answer,” he said haltingly.

“I think I did, I have. What do you need?” she said and it was a matter-of-fact Mary who spoke, but not entirely; he still heard, saw the other woman who’d been transfixed before the looking-glass.

“Do you know, I can’t recall? Perhaps it’s the night… I wondered, finding you here, if you were caught in a spell,” he said. He hadn’t expected her to laugh but she did, not like a silvery bell or a belle’s golden giggle at a ball, her own honest chuckle and he felt some relief with it, that he knew her again.

“Did you think I would throw the apple peels next and search for letters? Or try to swallow an egg half-filled with salt to bring on dreams? I’d sooner make an apple charlotte if I had anything to spare, no silly parlor games,” Mary said. “I hadn’t thought a man of science would be so… concerned about the occult,” she added. She’d dropped her eyes so he couldn’t make out her expression but this was the remark that mattered, he could tell that at least.

“‘There are more things on heaven and earth,’ Mary,” he said lightly.

“‘Molly,’ that’s what you said before,” she replied. She was willing to go further than he expected, to speak or to listen, to act even if she would be judged. 

“It was,” he said and waited for her.

“No one else has called me that.”

“Should I not, then? I won’t if you don’t like it,” he offered.

“No, you may. You may do as you please,” she said and almost seemed surprised by her declaration as he was.

“I don’t think so…but as you please, if it pleases you, I would,” he said.

“‘As I please,’ I hardly know what that is, what it means,” she mused but without frustration or indignation; she spoke as if he handed her some mysterious object she must discover the facets of.

“Then you must find out, mustn’t you?”

“I suppose,” she said, now so diffident he couldn’t help laughing a little, at her comment, the strangeness of the night, the way she was so lovely and careless of it.

“And has Hallow’s Eve spirited away our Nurse Mary to the fairies then? Where is all your splendid conviction, madam?”

“There are times it isn’t called for,” she replied, low, the words unadorned. He wished they were having this conversation over the dinner table with the coffee cups about to be cleared by a maid or as she braided her hair in one thick plait for the night. He wanted so to take her hand in his and he could not.

“Isn’t it? Molly?”

“It’s enough, now, this is enough. Jedediah,” she said and he nodded. “This night is full of everything jumbled and ephemeral and tomorrow will be here soon enough.”

“Yes, it will. It always is, isn’t it? I’ll bid you good night then. Good night…Molly,” he said and gestured for her to walk, so he might walk beside her and pretend or imagine or remember something yet to be, how they’d walk from an empty parlor up the stairs to bed, the door opened, the coverlet smooth and ready to be rumpled. Their reflections did the same in the glass but they didn’t look. Not now. The ghosts around them rustled and let them pass; there were only a few hours left until the dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> Here is my (late) Halloween story-- I made sure to pick a Halloween ritual that was common during the Civil War which is why there is no candy or trick or treating, no costumes, but some spookiness. I wanted to play with a sort of hovering point-of-view, to double down on the "ghostly" nature of the story. I think context will explain Mary's German and Jed quotes Hamlet. The title is from Emily Dickinson.
> 
> For your information:   
> In November 1864, Kate Stone wrote the following in her journal Brokenburn:
> 
> “Some gentlemen called, and we had cards. After they left, Lucy and I tried our fortunes in divers ways as it was ‘All Hallow’e’en.’ We tried all magic arts and had a merry frolic, but no future lord and master came to turn our wet garments hanging before the fire. There were no ghostly footprints in the meal sprinkled behind the door. No bearded face looked over our shoulders as we ate the apples before the glass. No knightly forms of soldiers brave disturbed our dreams after eating the white of an egg half-filled with salt.”


End file.
